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redletterdave writes: "The stodgy old enterprise company whose former CEO once called open source Linux a 'cancer' is gone. So is its notorious tendency to keep developers and consumers within its walled gardens. The 'One Microsoft' goal that looked like more gaseous corporate rhetoric upon its debut last summer now is instead much closer to actual reality. No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows. As goes the Windows kernel, so goes the entire company. Microsoft finally appears to have aimed all its guns outside the company rather than at internal rivals. Now it needs to rebuild its empire upon this new reality."

Rather than one interface, they should just enforce what they did ages ago and maintain a consistent style guide(until they broke it with things like ribbons). The GUI can vary, but keep the flow, terminology, and the look as similar as possible.

I have a large monitor and I sit 2 arms lengths away, but Microsoft in their wisdom thinks that the interface for that should lean towards touch. If they treat the small phone screen the same as a large screen interface, and that everyone is going to use touch interface - then you're not creating a usable platform for any since you are constantly making compromises. You can use the same operating system core, the same API, and make things interoperate without having the same interface. If I wrote a deskt

Microsoft *thought* the desktop should lean toward touch. They seem to have revised their opinion on that.

Of course touch can be useful on a desktop. I was able to start my father on Android as his first internet-connected device, and he was easily able to transition to Windows 8 on a desktop PC because of the touch interface. A mouse isn't intuitive to us all like touching a visible object with a finger is.

Microsoft *thought* the desktop should lean toward touch. They seem to have revised their opinion on that.

Or so they claim. I haven't seen much real evidence of that, though. Win 8.1.1 threw a couple of small bones in that direction, but those changes were pretty weak sauce. Perhaps Win 9 will show something more substantial.

you're not creating a usable platform for any since you are constantly making compromises

Microsoft has a long, proud history of compromising the usability of their products for power users for the sake of accommodating casual users who've never read the manual and expect everything to work like Word... even when it turns an action you're going to do a LOT into 40 seconds of drilling down through menus and dialogs to do something a non-Microsoft application might be able to do with ctrl-shift-rightclick and a few keystrokes. More importantly, though, is that Microsoft has increasingly gotten int

Microsoft SHOULD have taken MVC design to its next logical level, and built upon.net instead of throwing it all away in the blighted name of Metro... common model and controller code across all Windows platforms, with different views for desktop, tablet, and maybe mobile devices whose displays are too small to treat like a tablet. They could have compiled the code to CLR, then had the installer itself compile it to native code optimized for the local platform. But no... they just *had* to ruin a good thing, and try to ram touch down everybody's throats.

This does not make sense to me at all. While I agree that's the way they should have taken (IMHO using MVVM instead of MVC), it is almost exactly the way they took. They didn't have all the ducks in row at the first iteration, but it was the plan all the way. They said so at the time.

You did not belive the FUD about Microsoft abandoning.NET did you?.NET is very, very much in the game. At/Build// Microsoft just announced Universal Apps [pcworld.com].

One technology enthusiast at Web site kuro5shin noted many of the hacks (additions) to the code base included some colorful comments and creative use of adjectives in noting programming changes.

In this case, the reviewer concluded the code was generally "excellent." But he also noted the many additions to the Windows code to be almost universally compatible with previous Windows versions. And third-party software has "clearly come at a cost, both in developer-sweat and the elegance (and hence stability and maintainability) of the code."

GP is correct, those who took a look at it indeed came away with the impression that it was quite pristine.

First, there are many people who like the NT kernel itself, but don't necessarily like the constantly changing mess on top of it (although WinRT is probably a much better design than Win32). Second, many people certainly acknowledge that the Windows code base is very high on many quantitative aspects (e.g., that compared to average commercial software, it's virtually bug-free) but that's not the same thing as being a "well designed componentized system". And last but not least, even back then, the people ap

Apparently the recent updates brought the Modern apps to taskbar and gave them an autohide title bar with minimize and close controls. When the Start Menu update (the most important piece) arrives later, it's gonna be pretty good already.

By the way I actually like the idea of snapping the Modern apps to the side of the desktop. It's a good way to utilize a widescreen monitor by docking Twitter or something else there. I wouldn't care about Modern apps otherwise, but this is a fun feature.

By the way I actually like the idea of snapping the Modern apps to the side of the desktop. It's a good way to utilize a widescreen monitor by docking Twitter or something else there. I wouldn't care about Modern apps otherwise, but this is a fun feature.

Of course. The whole problem with Metro/Modern was that they set their user-interface back to the DOS days with only a single application displayed at a time. As long as Metro apps work in Windows, Metro is no longer a huge step back.

One thing this should help with is not making devs afraid to adopt a particular technology from MS, which is later trashed due to it having won a political, rather than technical, battle for promotion. For example, WCF was touted as the only way to do XML/HTTP services replacing the binary remoting protocol for several years, and then WebAPI replaced it. WCF devs are now irritated. Same with SilverLight, though WAY worse - "this is THE platform for Windows 8!", then, "Uh, not really.". I get the sense these teams have to compete for their platform to get noticed and marketed, instead of collaborate and take the advantages from two competing platforms.

Totally hit nail on head there. It's always been a gamble which of the different frameworks will mesh out in the petty internal battle. It's hard to bank on any MS tech because you never know when it might just up and vanish. I've seen some say, oh then I guess we should just stick to COM then. No, but changing the game as often as I change my phone isn't going to help you win converts.

I don't see devs being hurt by this at all. Sure, Microsoft has changed what it is pushing, but their support of deprecated technology is still excellent. Not only is WCF still supported, but their SOAP stuff still continues to work just fine (and to be fully supported by Visual Studio), even though it hasn't been pushed for over ten years.

As for Silverlight - anyone that thought that was going to work wasn't paying attention. The fact is, there are still two markets for Windows apps; corporate stuff that h

Regarding Silverlight, you are factually correct on all points, but even so, app store development is kind of a crap shoot as far as convertibility to money goes, and now those companies are left with "the new IE6" in terms of entrenched intranet applications which the engineering team can't convince management to give them budget to port to a forward-compatible technology, because it's in place, and it works.

WCF isn't dead, no, and I didn't really mean to say that so much. But as the "guy who touted WCF to replace remoting" at my shop, I've also been the loudest voice heard to push people to WebAPI unless they REALLY, REALLY NEED WCF, due to the configuration overhead. WebAPI took me, I don't know, a few hours to implement the first time, as opposed to weeks getting WCF to run w/ SSL termination at a load balancer...there is a place for WCF, but not when you need simple XML or RESTful data interchange.

Try the Windows Web Services alternative (a compatible system designed by the Windows team, significantly faster and less memory intensive).

I also thought the new preferred way to write back-end services was to sue the REST toolkit that came out with VS2013 (ex codename casablanca). WCF is only still around because the,NET devs don't have much of an alternative, that's all.

Although come to think of it, this post is long-winded and adulatory, but it does give good insight into what Microsoft is planning for the future, and why the board chose the CEO they did. He is planning on making windows Azure the platform that runs the internet, and making a ton of revenue that way.

I'm somewhat skeptical that they will be able to compete with OpenStack. Not because they can't make a better product, maybe they can; but because people are still wary after the destruction of VB. Why woul

Please define "VB" as used in your post. It usually stands for Visual Basic, but that hasn't been destroyed - even going all the way back to the pre-DotNet VB6 the apps run fine on Windows 8, so that can't be it.

...He is planning on making windows Azure the platform that runs the internet, and making a ton of revenue that way...

Their only hope is to bulldoze the Windows servers and put in nice Linux clusters like everybody else. Otherwise, the inevitable result will be high comedy. Except for those unfortunate victims who decide to throw their corporate fortunes in with Microsoft's big system expertise.

This would happen to any group that gains market control.IBM, Microsoft, Apple...

If a Linux distribution somehow got a large foothold in the market, they will find a way to keep their dominance. Having a particular fork of the kernel, a distribution system that is a bit different, rename some folders around. Add a closed source install tool or Windows manager....

Correct. You'll notice I'm not shouting for any particular company to gain a monopoly or near-monopoly, As none of the companies you mentioned have ever wielded, or indeed abused the kind of power MS had, they are not considered as dangerous or debate-worthy in this regard.

The health of an eco-system can be measured by its diversity and MS has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be a diversity-killer.

This would happen to any group that gains market control.IBM, Microsoft, Apple...

Not at all true. IBM and Apple both are strong contributors to many open source projects, so as they gain power lots of tooling and frameworks are produced that benefit everyone outside those companies.

Microsoft traditionally had contributed little to open source, with everything being worked on held internally. That's changing to some extent, but that was the reason why the industry suffered under Microsoft dominance, becaus

This would happen to any group that gains market control.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple...

There is something to this post, certainly now that Google has gained traction with Android, they've begun making it less open (whether you think their motivations are sincere or not, that is what's happening).

My ideal world would have 20% Linux, 20% OSX, 20% windows, and 20%BSD, with some room there for other interesting alternatives.

This would happen to any group that gains market control.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple...

Maybe, but not all companies are actually trying to gain monopolistic control of a major chunk of the computing market like Microsoft has always tried to do and has actually had in the past. Apple, for example, would love to own everything everywhere, but they clearly have not even the desire to do what would be necessary to gain the same control over the PC space as Microsoft once had, and has shown no willingness to compete head-on with Android for the entire smartphone space. Apple wants to make a ton

They never stopped trying. What do you think Secure Boot is? Anyone can design an effective vendor-neutral protection system against boot-sector rootkits - it's a simple matter of storing the EFI bootloader hash in config flash and requiring a new one be re-hashed manually after OS installation. Trivial. But somehow Microsoft and Intel instead managed to come up with an over-complicated solution that just happens to only work for OS vendors which have the market share to get their own public keys added to t

Jest if you want, but the "One $company" slogan has been used by my last two employers and at least 4 companies I worked with.While it somewhat makes sense in the case of recent mergers, it's mainly just one of the recent CEO buzzwords.We know that most CEOs are sheep who just follow groupthink to be safe ("everybody else agrees it's the right thing now")Wouldn't you, if you had that much at stake?

Their motto of "Developers, Developers, Developers" also disappeared with Ballmer's exit. Everything is now getting locked down to the max in their attempt to be like Apple. What makes it worse is that they don't seem to have a direction as far as application development goes. They were strongly pushing portable.NET when there was no need for cross platform applications, but as soon as ARM gets into their mix of products, they drop that strategy and go with a native code strategy. It's all mixed up and extremely confusing. Their complete lack of direction is certainly not welcoming to developers trying to figure out how they should target the Windows platform, and that doesn't even take into account their confusion on user interfaces as well.

Microsoft's previous success was based on offering very cheap products that were friendly to developers. Yeah, their products were buggy and unfinished, but they were a bargain, and you could always "embrace and extend" them as you saw fit. Now, they are trying to market themselves as a premium luxury product like Apple (at least the consumer end) and walling the garden as much as possible. They're locking down the hardware, too, and alienating their hardware partners, who were the greatest drivers of their previous success. It's a big change. Can they do it? Hyundai managed to convert themselves from being a discount car manufacturer to a more upscale brand, but Hyundai didn't have the problem with their brand reputation that Microsoft has. Microsoft has made cheap crap for so long, I don't see how they manage to convince everyone that they are now an "upscale" high quality manufacturer of products and services.

| They were strongly pushing portable.NET when there was no need for cross platform applications, but as soon as ARM gets into their mix of products, they drop that strategy and go with a native code strategy

I think that was driven by power dissipation motivations. The purpose of fast native code isn't speed, but low power consumption.

.NET seems to live in a zombie state, not really dead, but not really alive, either. They haven't killed it, but they aren't going to expand on it, either. Who knows where things really stand. The RT strategy seems to be in constant flux, too.

Yes, I know..NET is big, yet Microsoft has made it clear that they are going in a different direction. They haven't abandoned.NET yet, but they aren't going to be devoting a lot of resources to it either as they are pushing the RT and Azure stuff now.

Windows was cheap. For most people it appeared to be "free". A lot of their stuff seemed pricey at the time, but they were always cheaper than their competition. SQL Server cost less than Oracle. IIS cost less than Netscape Web Server. Windows Mobile cost less than Palm. Visual C cost less than Borland. Office cost less than Word Perfect. Mcrtosoft's pricing is what drove a lot of these guys out of business. Microsoft's products were cheaper quality-wise, too, which is why they have such a terrible

.NET was cross platform--at least cross hardware. Yes, it was Windows-only, but a.NET application could run on an ARM machine or any other hardware that might run windows, since.NET was hardware independent byte code. Yes, you were still stuck on some form of Windows OS to use it, but now that they are selling windows on both ARM and Intel, it would seem to behoove them to support a portable hardware application strategy, yet they have essentially abandoned it.

The new captain has set a new course, one that veers away from the rocks. But this ship will take a long time and a lot of leeway to make that turn.

(Of course, I thought the old captain should have been 'relieved for cause' years ago, but since personally I'm neither a customer/user nor a direct shareholder in MSFT, it really wasn't my business:-)

I was saddened to see Ballmer go. I felt that all the Microsoft toadies richly deserved him. It would have been nice to see him go down with the ship, but I knew in my heart what rats do when the water starts rising. I sincerely hope that Nadella proves himself fully worthy to fill Ballmer's clown shoes.

I tried to figure that out too. The article is talking about the future, Microsoft's intentions, so it would be fair for them to say they intended to change it in the future.

That was the viewpoint I used to read the article, and I looked specifically for that walled garden problem to see what they planned on doing about it. As far as I can tell, they are doing nothing about it, absolutely nothing. When they say they will let you leave the 'walled garden,' what they mean is they will let you use Microsoft

One code base is just the first step. The problem is how tightly the presentation layer is tied to the kernel. Microsoft would have been in a better position if they broke it out more like the linux pyramid with a common kernel at the base, plumbing in the middle and a display manager on top. Then, the presentation layer in that display manager could be swapped out as needed based on the form factor involved.

KDE did this with their netbook and desktop interfaces. Regardless of which one you use, it is sti

If you "interact" (I assume you mean copy and re-distribute) with proprietary code is it even more a mine field, because if you copy proprietay code in your project without an explicit license which allows this you cannot do anything anymore (not even use it yourself - which the GPL allows). So if the GPL is cancerous, proprietary code is instant death.

You can "interact with" GPL code just fine, as long as your proprietary code isn't a derivative work of the GPL code in the copyright sense.

So you can exec() it, you can call it from the shell, you can send packets to it and receive responses, in some cases you can even have proprietary code as a module/plugin being called by the GPL'd code.

People often equate open source with GPL so one might also be quick to assume he's talking about developing proprietary software and profiteering off of open source but that is not always the case; GPL often presents itself as a pain for open source developers as well who may want to license their software under an even more liberal license such as BSD [opensource.org], MIT [opensource.org] or even the WTFPL [wtfpl.net] and wish not to taint their software with the ideological restrictions and burdens GPL places upon its users.

By "even more liberal", you mean less free, since BSD allows anyone to essentially take code for their own personal use without giving anything back to the project (like Apple using the BSD kernel to make lots of money, but not allowing the BSD folk any access to the Apple code that interacted with it).

I would have thought they'd want a kernel optimized for small devices driving the phones and a different one for desktops. Maybe have them implement the same API. But isn't the kernel something you'd want optimized for the device family?

I don't care about a limited 2 aps at once, or touchscreen. The one thing Windows needs is the ability to fearlessly run applications. Windows should have been virus proof back since 98 when the Internet was becoming a big thing. It isn't as hard as you'd think to make an OS virus proof if that is what you're designing for.

The moment your platform becomes a fearless platform to try new software, people will try software as a hobby. The way Windows is now, before aps are catching on, no one in their ri

95% of the article has no substance and is clearly a bunch of marketspeak, though it's not clear who the marketspeak is targeted at. Users? They're not gonna care about any of it because it's gonna make sense or doesn't affect them. Shareholders? Maybe.

There's really only two bits that seem to mean anything:

No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows.

That's cool, and it actually means something. But do users care about this? Do investors care about this? How many Apple users know or care that Mac OS, iPhone, and Apple TV all share the same kernel? In general neither users nor investors know what a kernel is.

If you want to use a Microsoft app, you can find it on whatever platform or device you are using, not just on Windows.

That's means something too, but....are you freakin' kidding me? So if I'm making an Windows app, I'm required to design it to work well on a desktop, tablet, phone, and gaming console? What if it's an awesome app that sucks on a little phone screen? What if it's an awesome app that works well on a touchscreen but sucks with a mouse? What if it's awesome with a keyboard and mouse and sucks on a touchscreen? You get the idea...this is the whole thing they're trying to do with Windows 8 and surface and they're failing to hear users screaming at the top of their lungs DO NOT WANT.

It is a good case however, for you to not really be in the position to speak from knowledge on the subject. You've hated MS for years, and adding your two cents about "yea I went to Linux" over ten years ago seems about par for the course of Slashdot angry posts about Microsoft.

It's a tool. You use it in the right place, at the right time. When you get religion about a tool, then it tends to be a problem. MS or not.

It's a tool. You use it in the right place, at the right time. When you get religion about a tool, then it tends to be a problem. MS or not.

This. Many people seem to think that Linux and OSS is some holy water which should be applied everywhere possible to automatically make things great. And just like with a religion, friends and families must be converted.

It's the users/developers/admins, not MS -- at least not any more. I have MSDN and have used the support call, and I was impressed. I learned more about debugging on their OS in four hours than in four years on my own (came to an MS shop after 15 years of Unix/Linux). Some awesome stuff; even better than tools I used on Linux or Unix.

Now, a year later, after I "got it" that Windows is TODAY (unlike 15 years ago) a decent OS, I'm using the CLI and scripting in PowerShell and treating the OS with enough resp

An operating system is more than a kernel, and additionally the same kernel may run on different CPUs, so no, just because two computers share the same kernel doesn't mean the same apps will run on them.

Look at, for example, a Linux based OS like Ubuntu vs a similar Linux based OS like WHAT_YOUR_ROUTER_RUNS for an obvious example! (Was tempted to use Android as the example, but I believe Android uses some customizations to the Linux kernel that make it not-quite-Linux-kernel-though-from-a-developers-stan

But no, you can't run Windows applications on a Windows RT or Windows Phone device.

iOS runs the same kernel as Mac OS X, but you can't run OS X applications on iOS.Android uses the Linux kernel, but you can't run Linux Desktop applications on Android. (At least, not without a lot of work adding the needed libraries and recompiling everything for ARM.)